December 19, 2024
The editors of World Literature Today announce their shortlist of nominees, drawn from the pages of the magazine in 2024, for the anthology Best Literary Translations 2026.
December 18, 2024
When authorities take Penny Barnhill’s little girl, the single mother must get Phoebe back and find a way—despite being broke—to escape their shattered, bankrupt hometown for good. Standing in Penny’s way is her disability, a case
As one of the world’s preeminent writers, Devi’s work tests readers’ ethics while crossing corporeal, linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries. Here, a professor of global francophone literature shares how she and her students found enlightenment in such multiple crossings.
In this essay by Devi’s principal English-language translator, he asks: When will we stop reducing Devi to the labels of Mauritian writer, Indian Ocean writer, African writer, francophone writer, feminist writer, woman writer?
As the juror who nominated Devi for the Neustadt Prize, Fabienne Kanor made a passionate case for her work when the jury convened on the University of Oklahoma campus in October 2023. Dr. Kanor wrote the following encomium for this issue’s cover feature.
“you dance / because your bellies are empty . . . / that’s how you fight loneliness & the biting economic meltdown . . . / you men with villages of wives,” from “the dance,” by Vonani Bila
This erasured handmade map was crafted through and over Samuel Penniman Bates’s chapter on the 25th United States Colored Regiment in his History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–65 (first published in 1869).
“On the last solar term of autumn / so many good things are disappearing / The birds have printed their footsteps on the frosted tiles,” from “Frost‘s Descent,” by Ma Yongbo (trans. by Zack Rogow)
(books read when drunk)
Avid reader Andor Femin and the narrator of this flash fiction don’t always see eye to eye, but their observations about reading are always amusing.
The Lemon Tree
Tensions build between a child and a tree, both grappling for the attention of a mother.
Game Land
Welcome to Game Land, where your every pleasure will be satisfied.
What literature is available in North Korea? What do North Koreans enjoy reading, and in what format do they read? From Gone with the Wind to detective novels, Immanuel Kim provides an overview of reading in the DPRK.
Following the June 2024 elections in India, making Narendra Modi the head of a coalition government, a writer from New Delhi decides to revisit Amit Chaudhuri’s On Being Indian, set in a time of political tumult in India when the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party returned for a second term in 2019.
Despite Berdichev, Ukraine, being Joseph Conrad’s ancestral home, few of its residents seem to know much about him. Oliver Raw investigated by visiting northern Ukraine, exploring the parallels between Conrad’s experiences of growing up under czarist oppression and Ukraine’s current struggles against a resurgent Russian imperialism.
5 Questions for Devika Rege
Devika Rege’s novel Quarterlife (Liveright, 2024) is populated with millennials who are discovering who they are and what they’re for in what is sometimes called “the New India.” The novel was a finalist for and won multiple awards in India and was recently hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “the best debut of the year.”
5 Questions for Zahid Rafiq
In December 2024 Tin House published Zahid Rafiq’s debut short-story collection, The World with Its Mouth Open. In these eleven stories from Kashmir, ordinary people have unusual days, which play out in city streets, parks, shops, a graveyard, and a home construction site, where those digging make a strange discovery.
“Literature Is Iceland’s Cultural Legacy”: A Conversation with Thórdís Helgadóttir
An interview with Icelandic poet, playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Thórdís Helgadóttir
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